Postscript: Julie Harris

In the waning days of summer, when it’s still too warm to think about fall but it’s there, in the night air, I’ve been reading Richard Sewall’s essential 1974 book, “The Life of Emily Dickinson.” Structured like a collection of portraits—Emily’s parents get a chapter, her brother, Austin, gets another, and so on—the two-volume study is also a fascinating depiction of small-town life, and the intricacies of tricky intimacy.

In any case, the book set the whole memory of Julie Harris’s award-winning portrayal of Emily Dickinson in the playwright William Luce’s one-woman show, 1976’s “The Belle of Amherst,” in motion again. (She won one of her five Tony awards for her portrayal in “Amherst.” In 2002, she was given a special lifetime Tony award for her vast body of work.) I didn’t see Harris in the original production, but I remember a televised version that was released the year the play closed on Broadway, and what I remember about the TV version is how Harris faced the audience, which is to say the lens: with an openness, a flirtatiousness, that had everything to do with her imagination, and the life of her character, who lived in her imagination.

Harris, who died of congestive heart failure in her home in Chatham, Massachusetts, late yesterday, was true to every character she portrayed without sacrificing her thoughts and feelings about them—her musings about them—which is what gives an actor his or her style. Brando and Clift were, of course, masters at that—they lived inside and outside of the people they portrayed—and Harris, who was more or less their contemporary, did the same thing, but in a different way: with an almost feline delicacy. Harris never charged at the audience with her always-humane interpretations, but she wouldn’t let them be ignored, either. One way audiences get interested is seeing an actor puzzling over a part until there’s some kind of resolution. And it’s always interesting to watch performers who are technically in control deepen a role’s mystery by being mystified by that role themselves.

Harris became a star in 1950, when she played the embodiment of adolescent loneliness in Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding.” When she and her original classmates reprised the role in Fred Zinnemann’s film version two years later, Harris was nominated for an Academy Award. Was any actress more physically suited for a part? Thin and small, Harris always had a teen-ager’s body—a body that longed to be dressed up in adult clothing, which she always looked a little uncomfortable in because of the gawky, coltish way she handled her arms and legs.

Elia Kazan was right to cast her in his 1955 film version of “East of Eden,” alongside James Dean. While Dean represented—to the movie-going public, at least—a kind of danger or rot, Harris had an essentially good personality that could shame the bad. In their scenes together, Dean appears to be shut down, with something wild in his eye, whereas Harris is all openness, with stillness and questioning at the center of her heart. Harris’s Abra looks at Dean’s Cal as if he’s a mystery that she must solve in order to realize herself. (Harris always listened to her co-stars as if she couldn’t imagine what in the world they might say next, which is as it should be.) You can see all that in Harris’s freckled American face, of course, but you can also hear it in her voice, which was remarkable. It always sounded as though she had just finished crying and someone had told her a joke to distract her from crying again. Her laugh was infectious, and sounded as if she were taking in great gulps of air—a laugh that was on the verge of the hiccups.

In 1967, John Huston cast her in another McCullers role—as Alison, the sick wife of an Army captain in “Reflections in a Golden Eye.” Whereas in her previous film work directors had focussed on Harris’s extraordinary physicality—you can tell they loved watching her dart between the screen’s edges—Huston zeroed in on Harris’s smallness, and he brought out something different in her: her precious interiority, which is the first thing great actors give up to their audience.

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, wrote the catalogue essay for the Robert Gober retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.